Performance of decode-and-forward cooperative relaying over Rayleigh fading channels with impulsive noise

This paper presents the performance analysis of a decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative relaying (CR) scheme using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) in the presence of Rayleigh fading and Bernoulli-Gaussian impulsive noise. The exact symbol error probability (SEP) expression for direct transmission (DT) and SEP lower bound for DF-CR are first derived and then used to establish the optimum power allocation (OPA) for the source and the relay by exhaustive search. Analytical and simulation results for various scenarios with DT and DF-CR under the same bandwidth efficiency and power consumption are in good agreement and indicate that the lower bound SEP is very tight for the optimal Bayes receiver and CR in an impulsive noise environment can be beneficial at a certain degree depending on impulse power and impulse rate. Furthermore, OPA brings a negligible performance improvement as compared to equal power allocation under investigated conditions.